Sydney - Qantas Airways Ltd failed to meet its own maintenance performance targets, Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) said Monday.

CASA decided to investigate the carrier after a run of technical hitches that saw an emergency landing, bits falling off planes and ground crew forgetting to empty toilet tanks.

Sydney - Things must be bad: revenues at Sydney's Star City casino are down by a quarter as the comfort blanket of a red-hot resources sector slips away and more people feel the chill of the global financial freeze.

Times must be good: the Queensland state government is spending 400,000 Australian dollars (about 350,000 US dollars) a month carting water to Cloncurry, a copper and gold mining town that is running low on supplies because its population has doubled in the past five years.

And there it is: a two-speed economy - tough times in Sydney, where a fifth of Australians live, but dollars aplenty in boom towns like Cloncurry.

Melbourne, Aug 31: A new survey has found that most Australians would back the clinical trials of cannabis for medical use.

Melbourne, August 30 : One of the world’s most infamous and brutal serial killers, Jack the Ripper, is once again in the headlines, with sleuths thinking that he might have been buried in Brisbane.

The headstone at the end of a grave at the Toowong Cemetery does not mention the man, but many believe it to be the Ripper, convicted killer, rogue impostor, backwater quack and man of a thousand identities Walter Thomas Porriott.

Porriott, whose legally acknowledged name was Andrew John Gibson, was buried amid family shame beneath his ever-faithful last wife Eliza "Bessie" Porriott.

Melbourne, Aug. 29 : An exploding oxygen tank forced the emergency landing of a Qantas jet in Manila after it blew a hole in the fuselage, air safety investigators have found.

According to news. com. au, the tank failed and burst, blasting through the cabin floor from a storage area between business and economy class seats on a Hong Kong to Melbourne flight last month.

The website quoted a preliminary report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) as saying that investigators are yet to determine why the tank exploded, almost two months after the July 5 incident.

They could not rule out such an incident occurring again.